Glass Grapes and Other Stories

About This Title

Glass Grapes and Other Stories is the first full-length collection of short stories by distinguished American poet, Martha Ronk. Martha Ronk writes with grace, beauty, syntactical rigor, and the same attention to language as our most accomplished poetry. Glass Grapes is divided into three sections: the first has a similar narrator throughout, albeit at different times in her obsessive life; the second introduces different narrators many of whom are collectors; and part three focuses on the dissolution of narrative—not altogether, but in part and in ways that are occasionally comic or at least wry. Additionally, Ronk’s characters are obsessive, and no one is as skilled at laying bare the inner-workings of an obsessive mind as Ronk. Part of the reason for her success is that her language is so precise and her sentences so deft that the reader has no choice but to follow along until Ronk decides to release them. The result is a trip through the psyche of an acutely aware and fiercely intelligent mind. "The mesmerizing stories in Glass Grapes and Other Stories transport the reader to the introverted, obsessive territory of desire, wherein objects—a ring, a photograph, a partially read novel—acquire all the psychic peril of real loss. Fueled by dense and lyrical language, reminiscent (but never derivative) of authors as diverse as Duras, Sebald and Hejinian, Martha Ronk’s fictions are innovative in the most excellent sense."--Karen Brennan, author of The Garden in Which I Walk "Poet Ronk is an elegant stylist who showcases her narrative wiles in this polished first collection...[her] delicate, nuanced renderings are exquisitely crafted and demand careful attention."--Publishers Weekly "No contemporary American writer is as skilled at laying bare the inner-workings of an obsessive mind as Martha Ronk....her language is so precise and her sentences so deft that the reader has no choice but to follow along until Ronk decides to release them."--ForeWord Magazine "Shifting tense to conflate time, shifting point of view to schism identity, relying on poetic repetition to build resonance, these pieces break the "rules" and in so doing allow us to look at both the world and fiction through fresh eyes." -- The Review of Contemporary Fiction